War for the Planet of The Apes: Interview with Writer Mark Bomback

War for the Planet of The Apes: Interview with Writer Mark Bomback By Jacob Krueger JAKE: Today I’m really excited to be hosting my friend Mark Bomback as a special guest on this podcast. As you probably know if you are a listener, Mark is the writer behind the latest two installments of the Planet of the Apes trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes. As well as a host of other hugely successful blockbusters including Insurgent, Total Recall, The Wolverine and Live Free or Die Hard. First, I just want to say thank you for joining us. MARK: Thank you Jacob. JAKE: The first thing I am curious about is a lot of our writers work in collaboration with other writers, or are thinking about doing those kinds of collaborations. And you’ve had a couple of different kinds of collaborations on the Planet of the Apes Franchise with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and then with Matt Reeves the director on War. I am curious about what those processes were like for you.  What is the difference between working with a partner, coming in to help out with a project like you did on Dawn or working on a script alone? MARK:  Well, you know the thing is, other than Planet of the Apes, I have actually never co-authored anything. And truthfully the only film of the two that I co-authored was the last one, War, which Matt and I truly wrote together from beginning to end. So, how I came onto the Planet of the Apes actually when Rise was heading into production, Rick and Amanda, who were the creators of Rise of Planet of the Apes were getting a little bit---I don’t even know how best to put it-- a little “written out.” It was a really, really intense pre-production, they were doing a lot of cutting edge things. There were just a lot of moving parts, and Rick and Amanda were also producers on the film. So they, along with the other producers, decided it would be great to get an extra set of eyes on this. And so I came on and did some pre-production, inter-production rewriting, and got to work with Rick and Amanda as producers. So, I would sort of vet what I was doing with them, but we didn’t actually write together. And, in fact, I don’t even get credit on Rise because the work was really surgical and had more to do with sort of finessing things. When Dawn came around, Matt Reeves wound up replacing Rupert Wyatt, who was the initial director of Dawn, and when Matt came in, he really had a lot of work to do. So, the studio asked if I would come on and help Matt sort of realize his vision. So, although Rick and Amanda had written a script for Rupert Wyatt that was the starting point of Dawn, when I came in again it was really me working as a writer alone-- actually that isn’t entirely true in that Matt and I were sort of collaborating-- but, Matt was really the director and I was the one doing the writing-- although as we sort of got deeper into production itself, because we had such a crazy timeframe on that movie, Matt and I really were almost functioning like co-writers as well. So, when it came time to work on War, we both agreed “let’s just actually, now that we have the luxury of time a little bit, let’s write it together from beginning, from the very, very start.” And so, it is really the only time I have ever truthfully co-written. And I wound up loving it. And since the screenplay work on War, I am back to writing by myself. And while I do enjoy having the freedom-- certainly in terms of my schedule and having a little more say as to where things are going, and not having to vet everything through my partner-- I really do miss having a partner. Matt and I became super close friends as well as colleagues while working on it. And, I, to this day will vet things with Matt on other things I am working on, and vice versa.   I really came to appreciate what it meant to have a writing partner. You know, it doesn’t make the process go any faster. If anything, it actually, at least in my case, makes it take longer. But what you wind up doing-- again I can only speak for myself and Matt-- is I think you generate fewer drafts, because you wind up talking through everything, sometimes ad nauseum, but to the point where you’ve vetted a lot of things within the scenes before moving on. Whereas, when I work alone, I tend to want to get to the last page and then see what I’ve got and go back and go through again and again and again. So, it is a very different way of working. And it was also less lonely. Most of my days are spent alone in my office. Certainly today is a good example. I have been in my office since about nine in the morning, just writing. And while I love doing that-- that is certainly why I chose being a screenwriter as a vocation-- it is lonely. And there is something great about having someone to shoot the breeze with while you are working.   Also, I felt like Matt really helped me sort of dig deep and find the best ideas that were in my head, and vice versa. It was really fun to sort of dig into Matt’s head and say, “is this the best version of this or can we do any better?” JAKE:  I actually started out writing on a team as well. I worked with a writer named John Wierick on several projects. And it was interesting for me how different that was from writing alone. John and I were an interesting team because we had very different things that we were into. I loved to, like, blow out that first draft, and John loved to go back in and work through those pages tweaking things, making everything perfect. So we had a kind of interesting balance that we kind of developed over the years as a process of writing together. I am curious, like, what was your approach when working with Matt? MARK:  Everyone has their own version of how they work, but Matt and I, every morning-- or morning Matt’s time, noon my time-- our Skype would be up and we had a program called Screen Hero, which allows you to share a computer. So we would use my Final Draft program, but Matt could literally type onto my computer across the country. Matt lives in LA, I live in New York. And so, we would truly write the script together. In fact, we had a funny way of working. Everyone has their own crazy ways of working, but in this case, if I had a line of dialogue that I really wanted to sell Matt on, but I know I don’t act very well, rather than pitch him the line I would say, “what about this?” And then I would type the dialogue into the dialogue section. And then Matt would read it and he would say, ‘okay, yeah I get it but what about this?” And then he would change the word in it and remit it back. So that is how we did it, but it was really on a word-by-word basis that we wrote the script together. Which in a weird way, I think, you could only do in cyberspace. If we sat in the same room, we would still need to hook up into one computer and have two keyboards, because you can’t sit and type on one keyboard. So, we had two keyboards going at the same time in Final Draft, and would just write together. And if we got on a tear in terms of even something like stage directions, some person would just start writing the stage directions, and then the other person says, “Stop, stop I have an idea…” and then circle right back into the stage directions and add something or subtract something. So that is how we worked. We literally never had a moment of a script page generated without both of us staring at the screen at the same time. JAKE:  And how did that affect the nature of the product that you ended up with or the theme of the product that you ended up with compared to most of the scripts that you’ve done where you’ve really had the freedom to sit in the room alone and dream out whatever came to you? MARK:  It is hard to say. I mean I do think it is one of the best, if not the best, scripts I have ever worked on. So, I am guessing part of that is simply a function of two people collaborating. Oftentimes when I work on a script, at some point the director is with me in there again-- not necessarily writing but collaborating. And any script I’ve written that has turned out well has always been the result of, at some point, a really useful month or two spent with the director in pre-production or even ahead of pre-production, getting the script to really fire on all cylinders. Most of that has to do with digging deep in terms of the themes of the story and how the characters’ journeys service those themes-- things that are less plotty and more thematically oriented. And I think because Matt and I work in such a unique way, in that we wind up constantly watching films while we work, we would sort of watch YouTube clips of certain movies we were referencing while we were Skyping. So we could say, “Oh in the end of A Man Escaped there is this big silent break out sequence that I think would be a useful thing to look at for the end of War when the apes escaped the camp.” And we would have the script page open on one side of the screen and the video clip from YouTube open on the other side of the screen! It isn't the kind of thing you are going to do as much if you are working by yourself, because you are more inclined to just think, “Let me just get through this, my kids are inside screaming, dinner's almost ready…” like you are going to find better excuses to just move faster. When two people are working together, you tend to slow down and do deeper thinking. It doesn’t mean that at the end of the day the script is going to be any deeper or better or whatever, I just think you get there a little bit in a different rhythm, instead of just a couple of drafts that are just getting the story out before you see where else you can mine. JAKE:  We see a lot of blockbuster movies that are mostly focused on the pyrotechnics.